The Real YouQ

Q: What is your favourite UQ memory?

A: When I was in Grade 11, we visited the UQ Antiquities Museum on a school excursion. I was a young fellow from the Gold Coast accustomed to the neon and spangle of Surfers Paradise. I found myself gazing on 2,500-year-old Greek vessels and 3,000-year-old bronze daggers, and I was entranced. It's now the RD Milns Antiquities Museum, named for the man who would supervise my honours thesis at UQ 5 years after that first visit.

Q: Is there a place you feel most connected to on campus and why?

A: There are 2 places I am particularly fond of at the St Lucia campus. One is the Michie Building, where I studied classics and ancient history, and where I always felt welcomed and at home. The other is the old Undergraduate Library. It now hums with computers but when I was a student, the spaces were full of wonderful books and the air was fusty with the knowledge they contained. To get from one building to the other, I had to walk the length of the Great Court along a gorgeous sandstone heritage building that always seemed calm, unhurried, and tranquil. 

Q: Looking back to the day you first set foot on campus, is there anything you wish to tell that person now?

A: One day you will study the beautiful things in the Antiquities Museum, and in other places, and you will make a career out of conserving and celebrating our heritage. And it will delight you.

Q: What’s the one fact that people wouldn’t know about you?

A: I have just had a very personal memoir published called Prehistoric Joy. I’m afraid people know almost all my secrets!

Q: What are 3 things you can’t live without?

A: Books, my family, and books.

Q: What are you currently reading?

A: I always have a few on the go. Presently, I’m reading a history of the Anglo-Saxons, leavened with some Jack Kerouac (Big Sur). I find Kerouac tricky. I love his rolling, tumbling language, and obvious intelligence, but I don’t think he was a very nice person. It’s hard to admire the work of mean people, even when it’s beautiful. 

Q: Who are your real-life heroes?

A: I used to study Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and the pharaohs of Egypt for greatness but now I find the most admirable qualities – courage, resilience, loyalty and kindness – in my friends, workmates and neighbours. If you look, you will find the most heroic qualities in everyday people.

Q: What drew you towards pursuing a career in archaeology, and what is it about cultural heritage management that brings you so much joy and satisfaction?

A: When I was 21 years old, I won a scholarship to participate in an archaeological excavation in Greece. One week in, I found a foot (the toes in a sandal) from a carved marble statue, over 2,300 years old. I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up! It’s that connection with the past, especially its people, that drew me to cultural heritage management. I feel a kind of duty to tell their stories and to connect contemporary society with them. I feel obliged to play my part in the battle of memory against forgetting.

Q: Your memoir, Prehistoric Joy, reveals some heavy insights into your childhood, including stories of poverty and domestic violence. What was your process and how did it feel to relive and write about these experiences? 

A: I started writing my memoir when my elderly mother was in declining health. Most evenings after I had visited her in the health facility, I would come home and write down a few paragraphs of recollections. The memories were vivid and raw, even after so many years, because we had lived through terrible and traumatic events together. I'm still not sure why I felt it was necessary to get the story down on paper. But I know that I was driven by something. I think it was because I was finally giving voice to the child victims – me, my brother and sister. We had no voice when it was happening. We witnessed violence and experienced poverty, and we could do nothing about it. We were powerless. But my memoir has empowered us, retrospectively.   

Q: How does a successful archaeologist, business director and researcher find time to write a memoir, and how did the idea to tell your story through insights into prehistoric cultures come about?

A: I have always enjoyed writing in the way that some people enjoy gardening or strumming a guitar for relaxation. That being said, writing the memoir meant that I was permanently time poor and sleep deprived, with a twitching right eyelid! Originally, I had intended to write quite a formal textbook on the ‘archaeology of happiness’, looking at the ways that prehistoric peoples derived pleasure from fine food, romantic love, sex, family, music and dance, and beautiful trinkets. I set that manuscript aside, when it was barely started, because I ran out of energy. But when I began writing about my childhood, and the ways that it had been blighted by a violent alcoholic criminal, I found myself drawing on that draft manuscript and my knowledge of prehistory to find parallels between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In my case, it often saw me reflecting on the happiness that my stepfather took from me as a child. But the memoir is not all grim. Ultimately, it is a story about the universal search for happiness.

Win a copy of Prehistoric Joy

Contact is giving away two copies of Andrew Sneddon's memoir Prehistoric Joy. Enter the draw by 6pm October 12 for your chance to win one of two copies. Terms and conditions apply.